Velocity and Scale

These two concepts are central to my approach. If these concepts are understood and mastered, your great idea will have no limits. Here's how it works.

Velocity refers the speed at which a new idea can move from the real world (a designer or customer) through the development process and back out to the customer through a new version of your product. Your process needs to do two things:

1. optimize resources by managing the velocity of each idea, and
2. track the progress of each idea to measure velocity.

You cannot control what you do not measure, at least in science.

Scale refers to the way systems change as they grow. An example from biology is how organisms are built at different sizes. Exoskeletons don't work above a certain size: elephants have huge legs while spiders don't, etc. The rules of physics determine what is possible at every geometric scale. Surface to volume ratios constrain the shape of living things.

Your product is a living thing. It has a complex metabolism that will not scale well under the conditions of stress caused by your success and growth. You might be lucky, or very smart, but why not be systematic and consider the effects of scale on the velocity of the parts of your process?

This blog will continue to explore these ideas. The problems of scale will be the subject of a later article.

To measure velocity, we need to set up checkpoints and we need to mark the ideas so that we can track them through the process. If we rely on rough time-to-market measures and just look at the endpoints of the process, we miss the chance to find choke points along the way. We need a way to break the development process into manageable steps, and that is what the earlier posts in this blog have started to explore.

Once we can measure velocity we can also start to control it. It is not wise to move as fast as possible at all times. In the business world there is always pressure to produce results but there is also a trade-off between speed and quality. To improve quality we must be prepared to control the velocity of each step of the process.

The key to tracking ideas through the development process is to identify the artifacts that represent the ideas at each step. The artifacts are almost always documents of some kind. Only in the world outside can ideas be free-form. The type of artifact used to represent an idea will vary for each step and for each business context. For a very small development group, a single document may hold many ideas and a scrap of paper may contain a valuable idea. For a very large organization, a change management database is essential and provides great efficiency and flexibility at high cost.